jim mcdonald

Episode #33 March 24, 2016

Jim McDonald is a self-taught herbalist whose approach blends a folk and indigenous perspective of herb craft with the eclectic/physio medical approaches of 19th century American herbalism. If you ever spent time on Henriette’s forum or the Herbwifery forum, then you may know Jim. He also gives herb walks at many conferences, including the International Herb Symposium.

He has a unique way of teaching people how to connect with plants, and how to learn herbal properties. These are the areas we focus on in this interview, along with some other fun topics. Jim runs programs in Michigan from day-long classes to a 9 month intensive. He is a knowledgeable and engaging teacher, and I was excited to be able to interview him for HerbMentor Radio.

You can visit Jim McDonald at http://HerbCraft.org. His site has many wonderful and extended articles on a number of plants and how to use them for various ailments.

Episode Transcript

From HerbMentor.com, this is Herb Mentor Radio.

You're listening to Herb Mentor Radio on HerbMentor.com. I'm John Gallagher. My guest today is Jim McDonald. Jim is a self taught herbalist and herbal teacher.

His classes are based in Michigan and you can learn about his courses and other work on his website, herb craft dot org. Herb craft dot org, that's herb craft dot org, also has some wonderful articles and excellent resources. So welcome, Jim. How are you doing?

I'm doing really well today. How are you?

Doing great. You know, you were, you were, just telling me. Well, I'll get to that in a second but but first of all, I just wanted to say that I'm really excited to, to to do one of your herb walks coming up at the ninth International Herb Symposium in June in Massachusetts. That's really exciting. I'm glad you're out there doing that.

Yeah. I'm incredibly happy to be out there too. I mean, that's a real super honor when that, panned out a couple years ago. I was just like, oh my god.

I can't believe this. You know, You you get there a little bit early and everyone else is there, and you're like it it's kinda hard not to feel like even a little bit starstruck. Mhmm. Which is silly because most of these people are so darn approachable and nice and everything.

Right.

Because because like every person on your herbal bookshelf is there.

Right.

Right. Yeah. And I think the coolest thing about a conference like that that has a lot of people because it can be sort of frustrating when you're trying to decide, like, oh my god, there's seven different classes I wanna go to in this session. I have to choose between one.

But one of the great things about a conference like that is you see how many different types reinforces that there is absolutely no one way that's like the pinnacle to reach to Mhmm.

In terms of the study of, herbalism, you know, that there's just so many different people. There's a very clinical people. There's the very ill village herbalist people. There's the, you know, the kind of magical people, the folk people, and and no one's better than anyone else. You know?

They all just enrich the whole Hello?

Yeah. They all just, enriched the the whole nature of, herbalism.

Oh, yeah. Okay. Sorry. I dropped that for a second. So what I'm really what I'm really excited is that, you know, and and thanks a lot for, letting me join.

I'm gonna I'm gonna join you on, one of your herb walks and take the video camera along. So those people listening right now in a couple months from now will be able to post the herb walk video, on herbmentor dot com so people can get to see you in action there. So, that's kind of a new thing we get to do is play around with like, actually adding that, aspect. So I'll be, hanging out in the background unobtrusively taking in a I'll hook my little microphone up to you.

I have a little wireless and you won't even know nobody will even see that it's on you.

Good. Maybe I can get Bevin to tell me where the lobelia is. We can have people eat lobelia and then take what happens.

Oh, yeah. It can be like a reality show, like experiment, like, you know, like herb an herbal, experiment show. What happens when you get people to eat herbs that we're not sure what's gonna happen? Like, we can do all the things we always wonder what would happen if we ate them like, you know, what happens if you really eat a bunch of poison hemlock or what happens if you really go and, and eat, the red elder burrito?

You know, I I generally do encourage people to try those kinds of experiments but not ones that I haven't done myself.

So Exactly.

Because I have Have you what's the most, have you have you like do you know anyone or have you like tried some of those really like a little bit? Not that we're encouraging this folks, but they're great. Makes great stories of you.

What's your, you know, what's what's the Well, let's see.

The worst thing that I ever did, was to ingest a small quantity of calamus essential oil. Mhmm. And it it wasn't good. It was definitely very distressing to the GI tract, pretty much all the way around. So I I wouldn't recommend that. I actually pretty characteristically tell people, you know, essential oils, no. You don't want to consume those.

No. Definitely not.

There's a few that you can, you know, some of the mints and stuff that they put in candies.

Right. Right. Right. Right.

I know that that sometimes the aromatherapy people, there's there's a rogue element that's a little bit cavalier about using the undiluted ones. And, having having done it, I'd say from experience that it's not the greatest thing to do.

Yeah. For sure. One time I had Steven Booner on the show, he's talking about like, oh, you know, sometimes I tried a little poison hemlock.

I'm like, oh, don't tell people.

Well, I actually know a guy who use poison hemlock.

Mhmm.

That, it's it's a very good because poison hemlock is a paralytic poison.

Mhmm.

And so for some people that have, like, real serious nerve issues and muscle tension Mhmm. Associated with paralysis in their lower limbs, they can use very small doses of it, and use that medicinally. But the problem with that isn't that there's not an appropriate medicinal use. It's that having a quart jar or a pint jar of, poison hemlock tincture around the house Mhmm.

Is just such a huge liability. Mhmm. You know? Because you don't know what can happen.

If you have a, you know, half gallon of dandelion tincture and someone, you know, takes a swig of it, it's no big deal.

But when you get into those stronger botanicals, it's a little bit, sketchy to have them around because Exactly.

To non herb people, all mason jars filled with strange green liquid look kind of And why I always tell people to label.

So, you know, you were just saying, Jim, like, actually nobody's heard this yet before I hit the record button. And I said, oh no no no. I wanna ask you about that in a second when I hit the after I hit the record button because I didn't want anyone to miss the fact that, you know, it's early spring where you live and you were just saying that you were out, gathering some, willow bark because you had some downed trees.

Yeah. Actually, willow flowers.

Oh, flowers. I'm sorry. Okay.

So tell us about that and what you're gonna need.

I'm thinking to bark too. I'll I'll probably get that in the next couple days. But the flowers, they're they're a little bit more, what's the tail end of their season two. They're kinda, you know, withering out.

But, we had a a bad storm come through here and knocked down trees all over the place. And, as always happens with bad storms, you know, the willows get just ravaged. And, you know, they recover pretty well because if even if a branch falls in the mud, it'll it'll root and grow. Mhmm.

But they're all over the ground, so I just picked as many flowers. I was, in Mississippi last March, I think.

And, an herbalist down there named, Daryl Martin was, talking about, using willow flowers. And if you read about them in in a book that has any information about them, you'll read that, black willow flowers are an anaphrodisiac.

Mhmm.

And, he was explaining that it's not so much like, oh, you have someone, you know, who's really sexed up and they need to tone that down, but that it's a good nervine for people who are either, like, really angst ridden because of sexual frustration Mhmm.

Or for, like, teenagers.

You know?

They all their hormones are raising and they're just, you know, irritable and cranky and ornery and all that. Mhmm. It's a very specific nervine for that kind of a hormonal irritation and and anger and frustration.

Okay.

So Well, you know, I hear I hear about something like that and I'm like, I need to try it.

Right. Right. Right. Right. Or find a teenager. Right?

I mean, our Right.

Our own kids aren't that old yet.

So Stock up now.

Stock up now. How how old are you how old are your kids? You have how many kids?

I've got a a little bit over one year old and a little bit over five year old.

So I've got a ways to go to.

Oh, okay. Yeah. I have a I have a turning ten this year. So I'm at least starting to realize that it's a reality that I'm going to have a teenager.

I see it.

I see it like it's in the future. It's really close, you know. So, so and then you said some bark and you were saying something about like, you know, you're gathering branches higher up on the tree. Is that what you were telling me?

Well, one of the things that I like to do is because you can read I mean, especially, a lot of people don't harvest barks because people are sketchy about harvesting trees in general. Mhmm. You know, it's it's really funny that people will or not funny, but, you know, people will dig up a dandelion. And you dig it up, and that dandelion is dead. Right.

But if you were to say, like, cut down a tree to harvest the bark Mhmm.

You know, generally, people don't wanna do that because, you know, we look at the tree and we say, oh, that tree is, you know, been around longer lived. And, you know, that's it's definitely something to think about. Is the fact that it's longer lived, does that make its life energy, you know, more valuable from the dandelion or something that that only lives a couple years?

Right.

But, you'll you'll read about, you know, what part of such and such bark should I use? Should I use the thin bark from the branches? Should I use the end of the twig? Should I use the trunk bark? And it seems to me that the best way to figure that out is to, you know, try them all. Know what the difference are yourself, and you can, you know, do that experientially. If you have a a storm like we did, I've got, you know, the ends of the twigs and the, the younger slender branches with the really thin bark and then the the big trunks are down, I can try all those out and I can taste them in Houston myself and really kind of figure out what I like best.

Mhmm.

Or if I, you know, notice either just experientially or intuitively some difference about which one I prefer.

Okay.

And, that's something that I like to do as much as I can, you know, is you you, try things out for yourself. Because you can read in books lots of stuff, and you can get great insights even from talking to other people. But the virtue of the plants is in the plants, And a lot of stuff, you just learn from them. And you learn it by having this deeper relationship with them and trying them out and experiencing them and, you know, your your interaction with them, your knowledge about them is all experience based.

That's exactly what I wanted to get into too here as the first thing and that was great. We had that little willow the willow, gathering mission as a as a segue here because, I'm sure this is all ties in to how you how you teach yourself or how did you teach yourself and why I like when I read your bio page at herb graph dot org.

You know, you get that sense that, you know, here's someone who really uses it and deserves and learned a lot. Because like, you hear that from a lot of folks that, you know, those people like you talking about at the IHS conference that you're like, wow, you know, you say a little starch. Well, a lot of the stories when I when I hear when I'm interviewing them on Urbaniture Radio, very similar story and I I don't wanna say, well, someone will say generation of herbalists or something like use use like Rosemary Gladstar and that generation of herbalists when they all got started is they all have the same story. Is that the story is that, a similar story which is, you know, there there weren't really many books around when we started, and we kinda had to learn by experimentation. And then the books we wrote were based on our years of experimenting.

And, and yet today why it's a blessing to have so many incredible books and resources by these wonderful, you know, you know, like when I say elders, you know what I mean? Just like, you know, look at the elders of our of our community that have, you know, passed all information with us.

It can get in the it is possible that this vast amount of resources can get in the way of people truly experiencing, herbs and to teach themselves through, like, the way you did.

Yeah. Absolutely. You know, it's, the real difference is whether people will because I've I've had people in classes and they'll say, like, you know, oh, I made a flower essence out of this plant or I sat down with it. I really came to this, you know, strong intuitive understanding what the flower essence is for.

Okay. Mhmm. That's great. That's just awesome. Mhmm.

But then I went and looked online at what the flower essence is used for and it wasn't like what I got wasn't right. And I'm like, oh, no. What you got was totally right. Mhmm.

You know? Because it would be like if if I talk to seven people that met you, I would probably get the same overall picture. But because each of those seven people has an independent relationship with you Mhmm. You know, some might know you from the tracker school, some might know you from Herb Mentor, some might be old friends from high school or whatever.

They've all got some different slant on or some different take on it.

And there's not one of them that would be, like, the right, you know, and and your family who lives with you, you know, they probably have a a much different take than Oh, yeah.

I'm sure they do. People.

But, every, you know, every person's take on herbs and when they get, you know, an intuitive understanding of something, they shouldn't try and verify it against something else and then take that other thing as being more important than their own experience.

Because if you think about the really interesting, books on herbs, they're not the ones that compile a whole bunch of information and put it together and tell you, you know, such profound things as like valerian will help you get to sleep and, you know, nettle is, really nourishing.

They're the ones that have these little idiosyncratic, like, insights about plants that are very, very personal to the author.

Mhmm. You know? But those they're just more interesting because it's it's that relationship, that magic of that relationship that really comes through and, you know, sort of inspires you and and makes you you think in ways that maybe you wouldn't. And when we do that as well and we share what we learned, then we give that back. Mhmm. You know?

And that's really cool.

I mean, that's one of the things I love about teaching classes is that I have students come and they say, oh, well, you know, I thought about this like this. And I'll be like, oh, really? You know, that's cool. You know, I wanna learn as much as they want to learn.

And that's, you know, one of the real gifts of teaching is you get, you know, a roomful of people, and they all have their own experiences and their own insights. And, you know, I've been doing it longer than most of them or doing it more intensely, but, you know, I'm not really better than anyone else. I just have my own way with it.

Oh, I I love that that statement because it what it does is it makes learning scientific program on.

You know, you say on your website here, I'm just gonna quote you here because it really hit home is, being with the plants creates relationships with them, relationships that change entirely one's understanding of their medicinal uses. So can you elaborate on that a little, Larry?

Well, one of the plants that, I guess, when I was in college, I I basically you know, Steven Buhner has this great quote in his, Sacred Plant Medicine book where he says that, you know, prior to him really getting into herbalism, he understood plants as, like, the big ones were trees and the medium sized ones were shrubs and the small ones were plants. Mhmm. And I was very much, like, exactly I could have written that, you know, that same thing because that's how I felt about it. We did a lot of hiking and a lot of, you know, time out in nature, and we canoed and we spent, you know, lots of time outdoors and just really love that.

But it was just a happenstance that, one of my roommates left a book out and I started getting interested in it. And then herbalism just kind of happened to me. Mhmm. You know?

I wasn't even really interested in health a whole lot, you know.

Interesting.

But, yeah. Yeah. I was, you know, I was in college. I was pretty wild.

What was your I mean, you know, what was your background? Where were you where did you think you were going?

I was a musician. I wanted to play music. Oh.

And, you know, I still play music but I I definitely prefer now to, you know, oh, I can't come over and play tonight.

I've gotta go out and collect this or do that or No.

It's more like you're you're you're changing diapers or watching.

Yeah. Yeah. That's that's the other thing too.

But but I got into herbs and, you know, one of the things that I don't remember quite how I came came across it, but, I got some, little bag of calamus root sweet flag.

Mhmm.

And I couldn't find a whole lot written about it other than that it was, like, good for digestion and all that.

Tasted it and I thought, oh my god. This is horrible. You know, it's got this bitter flavor. But there was something that when I chewed it, it, like, woke something up.

And I would wander around and I'd go for a walk, and I just nibble on it and, you know, a little nugget at a time and, go for a walk. And I figured out a lot about that plant. I'm just basically walking around and chewing on it and thinking about it and feeling it. You know, not just thinking about it cerebrally or mentally or intellectually Mhmm.

But really feeling it and and just kind of developing relationship with it. You know, I'd go for a walk or I'd wander around and chew on it, and, I got a sense for it. And doing that sort of taught me, oh, so I can do this with other things too because I would start to see little insurances. Oh, so I can do this with other things too.

Because I would start to see little insights that I got about it Mhmm. Written down somewhere occasionally when I would come across something.

And that really interested me, like, oh, wow.

You know, this says something that I've thought before. And then I would see things that, you know, written about it that I didn't jive with. And I I wouldn't think that I was wrong, but I would, you know, respectfully disagree.

Mhmm.

You know?

And so that just sort of branched out. And I remember one day I was looking for a a bottle of something, and I opened up the cover and I took out a Mason jar and took out a Mason jar and took out a Mason jar and took out a Mason jar and took out a wow. I ended up really getting into this.

Right. Right. Right.

Yeah. And it's only gotten worse ever since. I you know, tincturing in jars and, you know, medicine making and jars of dried herbs and, you know, all the different kinds of formulations you use, oils and salts and all that, you know, the the glass part of it ends up being something akin to, like, you know, the flower moss you get. First, you see one of them and then there's twelve and then there's thirty.

Mhmm.

You know, and then all of a sudden you can't put dishes away because you've got covers of tinctures.

Well, you know, okay. So you're talking about relationships with the plants, and I can see you're going around and you're, you know, you're you're you're getting to know them. It's kinda like getting to know people. You know, you you just have you only know people if you spend time with people just like you can only know plants if you spend time with plants. And I imagine you're using your senses. Right?

Your smelling, your tasting, your Yeah.

And absolute that's something I really teach in my classes is when I'm doing ID classes.

As soon as it gets warm, I wanna do all my classes outside where the plants are.

You know, it doesn't make sense to me.

But, people want to look at it. They wanna look at the shape. They wanna know at the shape. They wanna know if it how many petals there are.

Mhmm. But I'm always getting people, like, touch this because a burdock leaf has a very specific sort of feel to it. Like, I don't know another leaf that feels like a burdock leaf Mhmm. Or that feels like a coltsfoot leaf Mhmm.

Or that feels like a mullein leaf or a plantain leaf. They all have their own textures. They all have their own scents. They all have their own flavors.

They all have, you know, these little idiosyncratic things that your senses pick up without, you know, the use of your intellect remembering what you read somewhere about them. Mhmm.

And all of that, I mean, tied together really teaches you about that plant. You know? You you understand, like I remember the first time that I found a plant, like, in the dark around a campfire. You know, someone's like, oh, I'm getting eaten alive by mosquitoes.

And I I walked around. It was dark, and I sort of felt the ground with my feet. Mhmm. And I could feel, you know, a leaf.

And I bent down, and I felt it, and I could feel that it was planting. And I couldn't see it, but had that rubbery texture. I could feel the leaves on the underside and, you know, the way the the leaves all come together. Mhmm.

And so it's knowing a plant that intimately, you know, that you know all those aspects about it, which you don't get if you don't really spend time with the plant. You know.

I felt so cool. I felt kinda like Aragorn when he goes out and he finds the, ink spoil for Frodo.

And then you and then you took I'm just plant in the dark.

And then they had then they could use the plantain at night, to help with their mosquito bites.

Right. Right.

Perfect. Yeah. That's very true. I mean, and and it's like it get And when you're using your senses more and more, it just gets so in your memory and so in your ingrained in you that it's not like a conscious thing, you know.

It's just like, it just happens. It comes up. It's, like one like, the first time I understood this was when I was, I grew up when I was growing up as a kid, I wasn't into this stuff at all. Of course, you know, just like every, you know, any other suburban kid, I guess, went into whatever.

And, and, but I used to get poison ivy a lot because I did used to play outside a lot. You know, I lived in the near the woods and and I do was around, you know, my generation kids played outside in the woods before Ataris and video games and whatnot.

I figure.

And, and so yeah. And then so, but, I had it so bad so many summers in a row.

And then I'm out in Western Washington where there's no poison ivy.

And but in eastern Washington there is and I hadn't seen poison ivy been around in in in many years since I moved out here. So here I am on a trail in Eastern Washington not even thinking that poison ivy exists out there.

Mhmm.

When all of a sudden, I just stop in my tracks and I just felt it. Like I was just like and I wasn't conscious though. It was like, why am I why do I have that feeling? And then I looked all around me.

You know when you're startled little and then and then and then slowly, something seeps into your consciousness and like, I'm surrounded by poison ivy.

I had that exact same experience. And and, you know, poison ivy is this awareness medicine.

It's a really, and and, you know, poison ivy is this awareness medicine. It's a really, incredible plant. It's actually one of my favorite plants. If if if I had to do that impossible thing where someone says, like, tell me what your top five or ten plants are, I would just have to include poison ivy because they have so much respect for it. But, you know, I've gotten just so attuned to it from from really paying attention to where it's at and how beautiful it is and how variant it can be because it can really look in in so many different ways, but it has these common threads that, you know, when I walk into its space, I can feel it. Just the same as, like, when you walk into a house Mhmm. That no one's been in for a long time.

Mhmm.

You can feel it even without going and looking in all the rooms, you know, to see whether someone's there.

Right.

Or, you know, when you get into the car and and I remember I had this experience once where I left the restaurant, I got in the car, and I thought, oh, no. Someone stole all my stuff. And then I looked and I thought, this isn't my car.

It was just another car that looked like mine parked right next to mine. But before I noticed before I intellectually noticed that it it was clean and didn't have stuff all over it, it just felt different. You know? It smelled different. Like, it's it's, you know, it viscerally I realized that before I intellectually realized that. You can do the same thing with plants too. You know, the flavors and the textures and the feelings of plants, those are its language.

That's how it communicates with with us.

Mhmm.

You know, a lot of people, use different techniques to, you know, talk to plants or communicate with plants.

And many people feel like they'd really be blown away if the plant appeared to them as a person and spoke to them in some way and told them something so profound. And, I would I would feel that way too.

But Yeah.

It's never happened.

That's that's a plant you know, that's based on an assumption that the plant is really rising to a higher level if it becomes less like a plan and more like a person Uh-huh. And then communicates with you. Mhmm. And I don't feel like that at all.

I feel like, you know, sometimes they'll do that, but it's more that they're coming down to your level. But plants are communicating to us all the time. Their aromas communicate to us. Their flavors communicate to us.

You know? If they're astringent, they're that communicates to us the color of their flowers, the way they grow their habitat. And those are all things that you can experience viscerally, viscerally.

And, that We do it with food. Great way to learn herbalism.

We do it with food. And the food we eat are mostly plants. So it's, like, interesting that there's this separation between, you know, the vegetables and the food or grains on our table that we know that we taste and smell and touch and texture. And, you know, for drinking wine, we smell the aroma. You know, we do all this with with our food. Yet, when we people learn about plants, it seems harder, like like, herbal and herbs because there's some kind of separation in one in the wild world.

Right. Like, someone will say, like, what's the dose of bilberries that I should take? And it'd be like, what's the dosage of blueberries to eat?

You know?

Bilberry is just a blueberry plant that happens to be from Europe.

Right.

You know? So it especially those those food type herbs, you know, it it's really almost impossible to differentiate, you know, where the medicinal starts and where the food ends. They're just mixed up together.

Mhmm. Mhmm. I guess that's just part of the journey. And it seems like most of the time, people are using more nutritious, milder herbs and plants anyway because that's what most people teach about. You know? I mean Right.

And and that's, I have this this theory, you know, all throughout the country that people are really in, interest in native species and invasive species.

And, I've struggled with that myself because the response to invasive species, which would include most of our favorite herbs to use, you know, dandelions and Saint John's wort and burdock and Exactly.

Clean antleaus, all these plants that we just love, some people would like to get rid of because they're not from here. But I don't think that plants are native to, you know, geographical locations.

I think they're native to a a place, we change that habitat. And there are certain plants, most of the ones we think of as weeds Mhmm.

That they're plants, most of the ones we think of as weeds, that they're native to where people are.

Because wherever people are, we disturb the soil. We compact the soil.

You know, we till up the soil and all that. And there are certain plants that will just grow, in those environments and dandelions and plantain and burdock and yellow dock, all the all these wonderful weed plants. Mhmm. You know, I think when I got your wild craft game Mhmm.

All but two of the plants in there grow in my yard.

That was the point. Yeah.

And the reason that that applies because you live in in the West Coast, and I live in Michigan. Mhmm. And I think that a lot of people, you know, for sure, they don't live in a really arid region, probably find that too that these are familiar plants that that grow all over. It's because the habitat of those plants is where people are.

Exactly.

And and so, my friend, went down to Peru, and he said he would walk through the rainforest.

And he would, you know, walk for half hour and not see the same plant twice. And then he would come back into the village and he would find plantain and yellow dock and dandelion. You know, that's that's their habitat. That's where they're from.

And so those are really good plants to learn because they like people. They wanna be around people, and they, actually repair what we do. You know? Dandelion enriches the soil.

You know? We fill up the soil and wreck it and remove the topsoil and dandelion builds that back up. Burdock builds that back up. So they're sort of antidoting us.

That makes them good, good plants to learn. I remember another time, we had a really bad drought here. And, even the the trees were wilted. I remember eating a sassafras leaf.

It was like August. And the sassafras leaf, which is normally very mucilaginous Mhmm. Was wilted, and and it didn't have any slime to it. And, I walked out to the field and there was wild bergamot blooming and yarrow blooming and butterfly weed blooming.

And I looked real close at their petals, and these teeny little crisp delicate petals were perfect. They weren't lifted at all. And I thought to myself, well, that's interesting because, you know, these plants are all diaphoretics. They're herbs that help to, you know, clear heat from the body.

And that's what they're doing in their environment where they grow. Oh. So it's it's carrying over that there's some kind of, and I've never read that anywhere. But it was just this kind of that I had while I was out there.

Mhmm. And that's the kind of stuff that you learn and that you get when you really just think about herbs and feel herbs, at a very personal level.

You know? Sometimes I say you have to use your three eyes and when one eye is your intellect, you know, just like rational thought and reading and making, you know, logical conclusions. And one I is like intuition or something just comes to you. And then the other I is is imagination.

Right.

It's not making up use for plants, but just thinking creatively.

You know?

And and and and it's and then that can and then that toy ties into a story that you have with the plants.

Because I it was like one time when I was teaching and I'm talking about, you know, plantain and skin and then I realized, wait a second. As I'm saying this, I'm like, this is healing the skin of the planet.

Mhmm.

And I'm like, oh, right.

Yeah. You know, and I had that real but then I think, like, there must be something like that for every plant that's around us, but I don't always tune in or can't figure it out for all of them.

And I don't try to, but it's kinda like, but, it's Yeah.

It's great. You get those epiphanies because you know the plants and you spend so much time with them. You spend so much time thinking about them. You know? Mhmm.

And then, you know, some people learn just through books and through, you know, reading about clinical trials. You know, I always think that, like, a no.

I'm not gonna say bad book, but a boring book to me is one that says the plant does something and it qualifies it with studies have shown Mhmm.

Mhmm.

If I think Where where native people used to use it as Yeah.

Used to.

Right. Native is used for skin problems. Well, that gives me a a a clue.

But when when you know the plants, when you have that relationship with them, you know, it's just like you get to know, an animal, you know, that you're friends with that you see all the time. You get to figure out its personality even though it can't talk to you. Mhmm.

And plants are just a little bit more subtle than that.

So, you know, something that comes up as we're saying all this because it's, I think people are, you know, like, oh, okay. I but, when you when when you're you know, I can kinda understand where you're coming from. But, I think what happens may and I'm asking you this as, you know, a teacher who does a lot of walks, who does who does a lot of classes and interacts with a lot of people just getting into this, is that there is a, at some point along someone's interest level, there's a separation between them maybe just messing a little with store bought tinctures and dried herbs, and maybe going out and picking a few dandelion leaves and eating it.

Between that and actually feeling like getting rid of the fear to go out and, you know, experiment and to learn and establish more relationships. So, what do you say to people to help them get over the, you know, the fear or the or am I gonna pick a poison? I I did two walks last weekend and I In both classes, I got the question about is this, you know, when they showed them plantain, I think, and is there a poisonous look alike? I always get that question and then I go into a little spiel but I wanna hear your spiel.

If if people are interested in plants and they feel really trepidatious about picking them Yeah.

You wanna say, like, go for something so familiar like Mhmm. Strawberries. Mhmm.

You know, pick strawberry leaves.

Make tea with strawberry leaf.

Mint, You know? Like, you can just crush a mint. You can tell that it's mint. There's no confusing it. A lot of the culinary herbs, basil.

They're so familiar to people that they make great entry points. You know, plantain is the great entry point into weeds and into wild plants. Mhmm. Because it's, one of the things that I like about it so much is people can you know, I don't know of anything that works as good for mosquito bites or spider bites or bee stings and plantain.

You know? There's other herbs that work great, but plantain is just so good at that. And so people can pick it, and they're more comfortable rubbing it on their skin. And then when they have the experience of, like, you know, I went for a walk in the woods.

I got eaten alive. I rubbed the stuff on, and then the next day, I'm fine. They start to think like, oh, oh, now what else can that you know, wow. I just had this experience that I couldn't get from anything that I could buy in a store.

Mhmm. What else can that plant do? Mhmm. But but as as a point of entry, you know, whatever is really familiar to people.

You know, chamomile, you know, things that you can grow from seed. But but the mint family is is so good for that. Because so many of them are cooking spices. And a lot of them, you can feel them work.

You know? If you make, hyssop tea and you drink it when you have, I'm sorry.

If you make, thyme tea and you drink it when you have a cough or something, especially cold damp cough Right.

You can really feel it work, and it's very, very familiar plant that everyone feels safe using. And you can make your own tincture with it. You know, if you want, you can start off getting it in the the fresh herb section of a grocery store.

Okay.

You can pay a lot more than you need to.

And then from there, you can make little baby steps. But there's no you know, one of the things about viewing everything as being experiential is that there's no competition.

There's no, need to be like, I need to get to a certain point or I need to, you know, learn this and learn that before I can do this. Uh-huh. You you play with it and you learn a little bit. And if you're not attached to, like, thinking like, I'm gonna learn about herbalism and I wanna do it in, you know, two years. Right.

You know, good luck. You learn a little bit in two years.

You'll actually probably learn a lot in two years, but you'll also learn how much you don't know.

And you'll forget a lot of what you learn because you didn't experience and you just remembered facts.

Yeah. Absolutely. But to just do that, I mean, Matthew Wood has, in his, seven herbs book, this wonderful thing that says even if a person only knew two or three plants, they could have a very sound practice. It would be limited to what those plants can do. Mhmm. But if they know them really well, it'd be a very sound practice. And so when people say, like, oh, I'm interested go out into the woods or swamps picking turtle head with you.

I'm like, think if you if you only learned mint and chamomile, how many things you could do for your family and friends in the course figure. Right. It's actually kind of astounding if you start tagging away at all the different things you can do just knowing those two herbs.

Yeah.

Throw in ginger and garlic, and you got the whole Yeah.

In in the course of in the course of doing that, you end up learning stuff about working with with plants, and then that makes it easier to learn more herbs. You know? Mhmm. So you start with a couple herbs at once, the ones that you feel connected to or drawn to or comfortable with. And then they end up leading you, you know.

It's, sometimes I say that that I'm primarily self taught, but that's really not true if I primarily, like, got picked up by the the herbs.

And they they basically led me around and, you know, taught me a bunch of stuff and Where where do you how do you recommend people learn like, you know, because the biggest fears they have is like what if I do pick something poisonous or something and how do you what do you recommend?

They just kinda go in because there really isn't that many poisonous plants on the greater scope scope of things to really worry about. So I mean Yeah.

And very few things can hurt you or you're Right. Exactly. Commerce. Mhmm. You know? Mhmm.

But if there are, you know, like, we have water hemlock here. Mhmm.

We have that too.

And, people will will talk about, like, oh, that looks like queen Anne's lace. Mhmm. And I can either take them out to where it's at, which is ideal because if you see the two of them side by side, they don't you know, they look kind of alike but not alike. But you can just say, and this is something I learned from, some of Susan Reed's students is that the queen has hairy legs, that all the parts of queen anisex have hair on them.

The leaves have hair. The stems have hair. The seeds have hair. And none of the parts of water hemlock or or poison hemlock have hair.

Right. Exactly.

And it's got no purple action. As soon as you know that Right.

If you're out there picking, clean anise or wild carrot and someone's like, oh, you gotta be careful with that. You can just be like hair. You know?

Right. Right. Exactly.

And that's all there is to it.

And and, honestly, there's so many resources now.

I live in Michigan, and I live outside of Detroit.

I'm not actually close enough to Detroit.

It takes me about an hour to get there Yeah.

And maybe a little bit longer.

And you would think with all of that populace there, it's one of the biggest cities in the world, that there would be a lot of herb people that I could learn from. And in the Detroit area, I personally know, like, two or three herbalists who teach classes.

And there's a there's a couple more in Ann Arbor. You know, a few more in Ann Arbor that are that are good herbalists and teach classes. But when I was learning, there was no Internet. And so Ann Arbor seemed like it was really far away.

You know? What it's like forty five minutes an hour away, but, it seemed like that was far away. There was no way for me to learn about some of the other people. So I only knew one herbalist and, a phenomenal guy named Gary Montagio, who's got a store called Nature's in Detroit.

I would drive down there, and he's got, like, a real deal herb shop. You go in there, and it's not, you know, products. It's jars. He's got, like, three hundred jars of dried bulk herbs.

Nice.

And you go in there. But, you know, he's not like me. I I can blather on for days and, you know, he's a little bit more subtle. But I would go in there and sometimes he would give me some little tidbit and sometimes, you know, he would just say hi and bye. Sometimes he would really lay out some some really foundational ideas for me.

But nowadays, with the Internet, for as much as the, you know, how to say nicely, crap that's on there, there's so many good resources available. Henriette Kress has, I mean, almost all of the seminal eclectic and physio medicalist books on her site that anyone can look at for free. Right. Literally tens of thousands of pages of information that you could look up.

Some of the best information that can be had on Western herbs. You know, Susan Leed has a forum. Rebecca Hartman in, West Virginia has a forum. Mhmm.

A whole bunch of really cool people have blogs. Mhmm. There's the a h a h g herbalist. Henriette Crest has a an email herbalist, and you've got herb center.

Mhmm. And those are just such good resources for people who live in places, you know, still that there's not someone that they can go and personally take classes with. Yeah. Because there's a lot of people, who are phenomenal herbalists who will still be engaged in those open lists to anyone and that, you know, they don't get tired of people asking how to make a tincture.

You know, there are some, very good herbalists that just don't wanna have their inbox, you know, their email filled up with those. But, you know, I think that, wow, this that was me at one time.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, Susan Wheat said if you if you don't like repeating yourself, don't be a teacher.

Right. And I remember I talked to Rosemary Gladstar. I met her I don't remember what year it was. Maybe, like, ninety six or ninety seven.

And, I went down to this workshop in Ohio. It was the first, you know, herb workshop I'd ever been to, and I've been, you know, using herbs for maybe four years or something. And I just started teaching classes, and I got down there, and she was so humble and approachable, that I really admired that. You know, she didn't have any kind of, you know, discernible ego or, you know, I'm better than you or, oh my god. Not that question again, which as a teacher is kinda hard not to express because some of you do feel like that. Mhmm.

But, I remember writing her a letter and, like, months and months afterwards, you know, this is before email was so common, you know, she wrote me back.

And that really just impressed me. But she hung on to that letter. She took the time later on to do that.

I I sent her a copy of Wildcraft when it came out.

And, like, three or four months later, I actually get a a beautiful handwritten letter.

Yeah. Right. Right.

I'm on the card. Just like, nobody does this anymore.

Yeah. She's just a really special person.

And and I asked her about it once, you know, and I told her just how much that meant. And she told me about how when she was getting into herbs, how she had written a letter to, you know, Juliette de Bericte Levy Mhmm.

And just sent it out and how important it was that Juliette got back to her. Wow. And so, you know, when people send me emails or something, I you know, lately, I've been so behind on stuff because it it seems like there's nothing that I can do to keep my inbox below, like, forty or fifty emails that I need to look through. Mhmm.

And if you think think about taking ten minutes, you know, to look at and respond to each one or five minutes, it's, you know, it's a pretty big chunk of time.

But I do try and actually, you know, I save things. They get, you know, lost in the email, but I save things. And every once in a while, I try and go back and at least send something back to respond to them. Because I just think that's important to encourage.

Because the people who are asking questions now, a lot of those people, they're asking questions because they're really interested in learning Mhmm.

And that they're gonna be teaching someday. And you can't do anything better than to encourage them down that path.

I mean, that's just a cool thing to do.

Exactly.

Especially if you have your email on the internet you're just asking for it too.

Well you know I personally the kind of that's one of the reasons with the forum I put the forum in Herb Mentor because I felt that, well, like, I can answer people's questions. Like, I can get to so many people and that's where I can do it. That's the place where I do it. Right.

Because it is too much when you get a site that has a lot of traffic. At least you can get, you know, you can you can reach people there. And also I I personally like the forum platform like Susan Weeds or Henrietta's or all those ones. It's because like it's a group mind effort, you know.

And you get completely different perspectives.

Yeah, I like that. Because I know something but I don't know every obviously, you know, I'd be I kinda consider myself a more of a home herbalist medicine maker family herbalist level, you know. And I can share what I know but I'm no expert. That's why I enlist everyone else to help me.

There there's few people, like, on on the herbalist and herb Forum that, in some ways, I don't agree with at all. Mhmm. But in other ways, they are my favorite people to read their posts because from their perspective, they're not just throwing out something that they've read before. They really have a strong rationale and reason for believing that, and they convey it well. Mhmm. And I like people whose ideas disagree with mine. You know?

Yeah. Yeah.

Because that that teaches me. That stretches me a little bit. It makes me think about things differently. Right.

So that's one of the great things of that. I I usually say I think on my site, it says somewhere if you have a specific herb question, ask it on one of the forums. And that way, you know, if I don't get to it for several months, a bunch of other people do. Mhmm. But even if I can answer it, it'd be, you know, know, for people who are learning to be exposed to different points of view, and different perspectives and different approaches, I think, is is wonderful because it it broadens, the amount of perspectives that you're exposed to. Mhmm. And if you have more perspectives, you can't but get to know an herb, better or an idea better or a concept better.

Mhmm. That's yeah. You know, that's great. That's another way to learn that I hadn't considered or thought about before like that. That's really cool.

I like that. Awesome. So speaking about getting to know or learn about plants a little better, I'm wondering about and we're talking about using your senses to learn about herbs and what not. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to, how you help people learn about, like the different properties of plants using your sentence senses, you know, like, you know, like the different chemical properties or whatnot and what actions and, you know, on that level. Like, how you go about, from, you know, learning it from the plant all the way to figuring out what that means or what that's about.

Yeah. I think that, if you look in most herb books, there'll be somewhere in the, you know, the glossary in the back or like an appendix or some people are really cool and they put it right up in the front of the book Mhmm. That has something on herbal actions and properties.

Mhmm.

And usually, there's a long alphabetical list of, you know, things that explain, you know, how herbs work. Mhmm.

And I think that that is so important, but I I sort of have a really grassroots stripped down understanding of of that is that there are a few properties that I think are really important to understand. And then there are ones that, you know, they're kind of incidental. And it it can be confusing as to which those are because if you say, like, oh, you know, so and so cut himself and there's inflammation or I have arthritis and there's inflammation. They need an anti inflammatory.

You open up a book and you look up anti inflammatory. And, you know, the definition is basically something that eases inflammation. Mhmm. You know, it's not much of a definition really Right.

That you couldn't I mean, you wouldn't need to look it up because you can just figure that out yourself. And it might say, you know, ginger, turmeric, blueberries, slippery elm, marshmallow.

And if you if you know those plants, you're like, wow. Wow. You know, ginger and turmeric are really hot and spicy. Blueberry, you know, cool and fruity.

Marshmallow and slippery elm are mucilaginous.

The the nature of those plants is is very, very different.

Mhmm.

You know? They're just not similar plants on an energetic level. Mhmm.

But if you don't know those plants, how would you decide which one to use?

Exactly.

You would just pick one out or whichever one you go to the store and see you would use that. But, if if you go to the the the more core level of the, the foundational properties of herbs Mhmm. It's things like, is an herb astringent, which means does it, like, dry and tighten and contract tissues.

A real like, my teaching example of that is, like, you know, you're hungry, banana. It looks a little bit green, but you think I'm hungry anyway, and I'll eat it. And you put it in your mouth and take a bite out of it, and your mouth dries up and tightens and puckers. Mhmm. Everyone's had that experience. Mhmm. That is astringency.

And so if you know that experience on a visceral level, you know, because if I'm teaching in a class and I say astringent draw tones and tightened tissues has a drawing effect, and I see people writing it down, and they're not nodding or going like, oh, I know what that means.

Right.

Then I say the banana thing, and they put their pen down and they nod. Oh, okay.

Because it's not their intellect writing it down and trying to memorize the definition. It's their body saying, oh, yes. I know what that is.

You know, demulsants, or mucilaginous herbs are the ones that when you, mix them with water, they get slimy and gooey like slippery elm and marshmallow root are really mucilaginous.

And what I do for students is I have them, you know, get some powdered slippery elm bark and, you know, put a couple tablespoons in a cup of water Mhmm. And stir it up or shake it up and let it sit until it gets goopy. And then rub it on their skin because you can actually feel viscerally. Like, oh, wow. This coats the skin. It's slippery, so it's lubricating. And it's it feels cool and soothing.

And so you feel that. You understand what that is.

You know, if you drink, some really strong cold nettle tea, you will understand what a diuretic is because it's like, you know, one cup in, three cups out.

And you do that with these core, properties, you know. With some other ones, some like, relaxant herbs.

I like that term better than antispasmodic because most relaxants don't just work on spasm. They work on tension. Oh. You know, they tend to be things that are, they're either aromatic in flavor, like a lot of the mint family Mhmm. Or they have an acrid flavor. And the acrid flavor ones tend to be a little bit stronger to work more specifically on spasms.

You think about lobelia or kava kava Mhmm.

As being acrid antispasmodics. But most of the mint family, you know, if you've got tension Mhmm.

Herbs that are aromatic, and that would be most of our cooking spices, there are things that aromatics, because they have essential oils in them, they tend to be antimicrobial.

They tend to be, anti inflammatory because that's just been the nature of essential oils. They often tend to be diuretic because if those oils are processed by the body, they go through the kidneys and the kidneys basically say like, oh, this juniper is stinky. I wanna get rid of it. And so it increases the volume of, urine.

So they have the flushing action to get that oil out of the body. Oh. And then that urine being concentrate or that oil being concentrated in the urine will have an antiseptic action on the urinary tract. So that makes them good for urinary tract infections.

Oh.

And all essential oil, all aromatic plants are dispersive of something. Okay? So you think about, like, thyme or hyssop or sage is a decongestant. Okay? So if you apply aromatic to the respiratory tract, you can say, you know, they're decongestant to their expectorants.

They disperse that congested phlegm in the lungs or the upper sinuses or something. In the digestive tract, they are called carminatives.

They help to disperse tension and to break, you know, trap gas out of the digestive tract. And even for, like, the senses, if you make a tincture of fresh basil, and it doesn't need to be holy basil, just regular garden fresh basil, it's really good for brain fog. It disperses that that congested, thinking, that congested processing in the brain or in the mind, is maybe a better term to use. And so all of that, you can figure out just from being able to, with your senses, tell that the plant is aromatic.

You're like, okay. I know it's gonna disperse something. I know it's gonna have some degree of inflammatory and antimicrobial action. It's very likely to be a diuretic and probably an antiseptic that I could use for urinary tract infections. It's probably gonna help break up congestion in the lungs or the respiratory system without having to look anything up just by using your senses like that.

Okay.

Another foundational property would be bitters. You know?

Bitters are stimulating.

They basically, increase the secretion of almost all of the fluids and processes, in the digestive tract to get more saliva, more acid, more digestive enzymes, increase in, bile production and flow and release, increase in pancreatic enzymes. And all of that improves your ability to break down the food that you eat so that when it gets into the small intestine, it is absorbed better because it's been more thoroughly broken down. Okay. It's it's also grounding because it has a downward energy. Mhmm. And that's just not in, you know, downward down your body with your digestion, but it helps to take, too much mental activity and thinking and using your intellect, brings it down into the rest of the body. So those people who are ungrounded, bitters can really help to them.

And then the digestive tract actually produces a lot of your neurotransmitters that are related to mood. And so many, bidders will have either a calming, and this goes along with grounding, but a calming or grounding or even antidepressant effect. You know, there's some people, their mood, instability or their lack of, feeling calm or their anxiety stems from problems in their digestive tract. And if you see sluggishness in the digestive tract, and you also see, like, this anxiety or unsettled energy in their their emotional life, you know that that's a good thing to give bitters to. And, again, bitters are something that you can just taste the plant and know all these things that it can do. Wow. And and so those are the using marshmallow or slippery elm would be good when there's irritation or inflammation of tissues because that soothing mucilage will coat it and soothe soothe it and provide a, lubricating barrier.

I know that, you know, if someone's got poor peripheral circulation and their their cold extremities the warming things like turmeric and ginger make sense. And so these, these foundational properties really make something like anti inflammatory make sense, and they help to teach you how to choose between the herbs.

It becomes real and not just something that you're memorizing and then recalling.

Right. Because it gets on that visceral level.

Yeah. Visceral is the right word. It's just your body understands it.

Just like we talked about earlier about plants, you know, getting to know them on the sensory level, you know? Right. It's the same thing.

Right. And that That's the way that plants communicate to people.

David Winston does a phenomenal workshop. It's really one of the best that I've been to. And if you can go where he's doing it as an intensive or a long class or even a weekend class, it's called talking leads.

Mhmm.

And he goes through and he takes all of this and he says, something that I totally agree with is that it's not, you know, whether you're using the doctrine of signatures or flavors or, intuitive stuff that people just pick up intuitively from plants, it's not any isolated epiphany that you get or understanding that you get that says, oh, well, this plant has yellow flowers, so it must be good for your liver.

Mhmm. It's like, oh, it's got yellow flowers, and it has a bitter taste.

You know, there's two things that point in the same direction. And the more that you get to understand these sensory cues, the more things you can see pointing all in one direction, direction, and that just firms up your body's, innate ability to understand. It's like, oh, okay. I know what that's good for. Okay. And that's really what you wanna strive for.

You you can't do that unless you really have that personal relationship with the plants. You know? So if you're taking capsule of stuff and you can't taste it, you can't see what it looks like, you're missing out on, you know, a bunch of the different ways that that plant can communicate with you. It would be kinda like if someone were to meet you, but they were to say, okay. You can't talk to this person.

You know?

And you need to keep your face neutral so they can't read any facial expressions that you're doing.

Or or like showing a video of you or something where you're like, you know, they couldn't interact sensually. They can only watch it. You know?

I mean, isn't it the greatest thing about, like, when you go to a conference or you meet people that you've met online, you can put, like, a voice and a body and a personality to the stuff that they're writing and then afterwards, you have so much of a better sense of them.

Yeah. And that's kind of like what it's like when you're learning plants. You learn them out of books and there might be something like, oh, this plant is really interesting to me.

Well, it's interesting. It's actually never thought about that before because it's interesting. Like, because early on in learning, I I was, lucky enough to get a see weekend workshop. My mentors, at Ravencroft Garden and hosted Steven Buhner in Seattle and I Uh-huh. And ever since I saw then, spent a weekend with him even though it was just a weekend, you know.

Any new books he came out with, I felt like I digested and really got better because I could kinda imagine him.

Right. Right.

You got a better sense His voice and his tone and his, you know, like, you know, there's that, you know, thing.

Yeah. It it enriches just the one aspect of it that you've pries previously known.

Right.

And and like I said, it works the same with plants.

And there was I remember reading, oh, you know, back in, like, what, nineteen ninety four about Cava Cava. And, you know, it wasn't big then, you know, and it was really hard to come by. I was like, this stuff just sounds really interesting to me. And then of all places, I was in a gas station. And, you know, they have those, you know, usually ginseng and bee pollen and all that, you know, sitting at the thing. And I saw kava kava and I was like, oh my goodness. Look at that.

And I, I bought it. I probably paid too much for it. And I taste it in it. It didn't work all that well.

Mhmm. But tasting it, did something, you know. It was like, oh, wait. Yeah. There's something in here, you know, this crappy product, but there's something in this crappy product that I think I really like.

And then, you know, nowadays, I get mine from a, New Kehiva Trading Post in Hawaii. A guy named John Fowler and his wife, Rebecca, run that. And you get really good kava by them. You can order, you know, different varieties of it.

And I just like kava. I've had dried roots. I've had fresh roots. I haven't actually seen the plant, but I've chopped up the roots by hand, you know, occasionally, like, like, I remember four pounds in a night one time.

Mhmm. You know? And the cross section of the root and the feel of it, you know, different plants feel different when you're chopping it up. So that's even another thing is that when you're processing your plant and if you just put a plant in a coffee grinder or you wanna make a tincture and you have fresh roots and you throw throw them in a blender and blend it all up.

Mhmm. Well, when you do that, you miss an opportunity to really connect with that plant on a different level. Mhmm. Whereas if you sit down and you say, you know, sometimes you can't do that.

That's fair enough. You know, if people have busy lives and they say, well, I, you know, I wouldn't be able to do this. But if you can, you know, stay up, don't have the TV on, you know, don't necessarily be listening to music or something that's distracting, and chop the root up. And that process of feeling what the root feels like or what the leaves feel like or whatever, looking at the cross section, you know, as you're handling it, it goes through your skin.

The aroma of it will, you know, kind of permeate your consciousness. You know, it's just skin, the aroma of it will, you know, kind of permeate your consciousness.

You get a just this deeper understanding of the plan. All those little ways that you interact with the plan all connect together and and enrich the way that you understand the plan.

Exactly.

Wow. That is just amazing. Thank you so much for for sharing that. I mean, gosh. You know, because I mean, now people are, you know, listening to this or seeing, even a deeper way to learn and try and drive that home and the importance of that. But I love how you just so eloquently put all that together which is, I'm gonna have to listen to this recording again and again.

Help my own teaching and describing all of this because it's just, that's that's it right there.

Yeah.

Are we out of time?

Or Oh, no.

We can keep talking.

There's a plant that there's a plant that I use, and I don't use it myself because I don't need it. But it's called Yerba mansa. It grows out the southwest. Mhmm.

And I originally got it because one of the first, you know, stubborn cases I started working on, when I was learning about herbs was, chronic sinusitis that my my girlfriend, now wife, had, you know, had past tense at the time. Mhmm. And I started, you know, I mixed up some herbs together, and the formula got more and more complicated. And, you know, I think that at one point in time, I had made something that worked better than anything over the counter that you can get.

And I would make it up for her and she would use that instead, and that worked great.

And then at certain point, I was reading through and this is when I realized I was a total nerd when it came to herbs. I was reading Michael Moore's little clinical thing of specific indications Mhmm. Which is a text to document.

So no formatting, just, you know, one font, capital letters or small letters, Latin names and short little snippets of, you know, some, you know, fragments of specific indications they use for. And I was just going, you know, line by line by line reading through it.

And I came across this, plant, Amnemoxis. And, you know, it was like that one plant had everything that I was trying to get in this formula.

And so I searched around because I just discovered the Internet, and I found, best first to get it from.

And I got it for her. And it worked wonders. I mean, it was just really absolutely amazing, and it's become one of the prime herbs that I use for, chronic sinusitis.

And in another point, I decided, like, well, this is from another part of the country. I'd rather use something local. You know? And I tried to switch on people.

They didn't wanna switch because that one works so well. But whenever I would get it, I would chop it up and process it by hand. And because it's good for, like, cold, damp, stagnant, congested sinusitis specifically, and and I am hot and dry, and it's hot and dry or warming and drying. Mhmm.

I by the time I got done chopping up, you know, a pound or two pounds of it, I would just be, like, parched and shriveled, you know, with no fluids in my mucus membranes anymore, you know. It would almost take me, like, a day to recover. I started actually I would make, like, marshmallow tea or some demulcent tea or violet leaf tea is really good, and drink it before and after I was gonna chop it up just to counteract it.

So even though it wasn't good for me, it wasn't, you know, the plant that I needed.

Mhmm.

Oh, I have this, like, indelible understanding of the way that that plant acts from from doing all that by hand and and chopping it and cutting it.

And that helps me understand when to use it, even though it's not a plant that I need to use or, you know, really can use a whole lot myself.

Wow. Wow.

We definitely well, we definitely need to have you back to talk about some specific plants as well as some things that are huge that, you know, I just had notes on. Hey, you never know if we some people, you know, you you're a wonderful talker and some people had to give me two sentence.

So I always have backup questions.

But another When you're teaching a class and you go, any questions?

And you get like crickets in the back. Yeah.

Exactly. And you because you and you let a half hour for questions, you know. So so like, I, will have to Well, I wanna have you back sometime because I wanna definitely talk about, you know, something like like if we get into some more health things because air aircraft dot org has some wonderful, very detailed articles such as, this one that helped me out a lot that you you went out and, my back went out and and you put on your fit my Facebook page.

Here, go check this out because I put on a a little status.

Oh, my back went out and there you were with the answer and that helped me a lot understand what was going on, you know, information that I couldn't, you know, didn't see anywhere else to understand what's happening on my back.

And so, I'd like to get into some of that and I'd like to, like, get into some more plants and, you know, but what's what's cool is that I will be able to follow you around in the field. So, folks listening to this will get to know you a little more and get to see you. So it's kinda getting to know you you a little better, a little by little as you would have planned. So first, we're gonna read Jim's posts in the form.

Then we're gonna hear his voice under METRADIO. Then we're gonna see him. And that's all leading up to the chance when you get to meet Jim in person and then you're gonna have to fly to Michigan. Right?

And you can tell us about your classes that you, that you do.

Well, I teach around Southeast Michigan, quite a bit.

I usually do, you know, serve as soon as it gets nice enough to teach and and it's actually soon as things are up out the ground, I'm outside doing walks and, you know, pointing stuff out to people and in all kinds of places, you know, in urban environments, in country environments, in yards, in local state parks. And, there's a really wonderful resource in Southeast Michigan called Upland Hills Ecological Awareness Center Mhmm. Which in some ways I mean, it teaches so many different, approaches on sustainability from, like, health and wellness aspect of things. They do, Native American ceremony there.

They teach about solar energy and energy efficiency and all that. So that's been a cool place that, that that land has been so good to me, you know, over the years that I've been teaching. It's just always provided for me. And, I love, when people come out to that.

But I also, you know, do travel around to other parts of the state. I've been up to Traverse City. I've been up to Grand Rapids. I've been up in the thumb and up in the UP a little bit, doing classes.

And when people call me up and they say, you know, things like, hey. You know, how would you like to come down to the Gulf Coast in March and and, you know, teach a class for a weekend? If if I can make it happen, I'm I'm I'm happy to do that. Thanks. So it's it's kinda like, you know, if you wanna have especially if you live in, like, Hawaii Mhmm. Next to a kava farm. Mhmm.

You're there.

Yeah. Send me an email.

And probably all you need to do is give you plane tickets.

Uh-huh. Don't even pay, you know, just the plane tickets. Just kidding.

Yeah.

And and basically, if if I can make it work, I'll make it work.

You know?

That said, I'm a much better teacher and talker and presenter than I am a scheduler. So sometimes it takes a little bit of back and forth, emails and all that to make something happen.

But you're very available on on herb craft, dot org. You know, your phone number, your email address is there. You also do consultations over the phone or you do Yeah.

I do I don't do them so much over the phone unless it's something that's not too complicated. Okay. So, like, if someone calls me up and they, like, say, like, oh, I have lupus and chronic fatigue syndrome and, you know, I think I might have, a tumor in my brain and and all that. Well, that's a situation where I try and see if I can connect them to someone who is in their area. Mhmm. If it were something really specific that's not like a whole complicated, you know, whole body situation, which most things are, but especially, like, back injury type stuff.

Mhmm.

Because I'm I'm pretty good at that. And it's not so much have to do with, like, oh, what's your digestion doing? You know? It's like, no.

I was do my tire and the car fell off the jack. Right? Okay. Your diet doesn't really play into you know?

Your the car might have fallen because you have have sluggish liver function.

It's tempting to say that, but it's probably not the case.

But, you know, I just I I do my best to be available.

Primarily, I work with students and referrals, people that have been to classes because that it's sort of it's not that it weeds out people Mhmm. But it helps me work with the people that I can help the most because I do have young kids and I I seemingly have, like, thirty other jobs that I'm confident, you know, working and trying to make things fit. I mean, even coordinating with you with, two guys that have small children, you know, is is a lot of work.

Right. I know. We were talking about before we started how, okay, my kids are out with Kimberly and then they're going to a class and then yours are got to organize. So we in order to get an hour phone call here, and both of us have to do all the schedule, Josh.

Yeah. But I like to I like to think about, you know, like, is the person that I'm gonna do a consultation with, am I gonna be really a person who who adds something special with that? And and if it if it ends up that someone is gonna talk to me and and most of their concerns is that, you know, say, like, they have type two diabetes Mhmm. And most of their concerns is diet Mhmm. You know, there's people that can do that just as well and better than I can. Mhmm. And so I like to really sort of, like, you know, take clients that I feel like are a good fit.

You know? And maybe that's because I'm not, you know I don't have as much experience to be, like, the great herbalist who's so good at everything. Mhmm. Mhmm. But, you know, that that's what works for me now.

And, What about, thinking thank you for explaining that.

What about, I'm thinking I was one other question I wanna ask you. Do you ever think about, what got got a book in your future or something like that?

Oh, I have three books that, people be like, oh, I saw on your website you're working on a book.

And I was like, I read that too. It all came to a screeching halt when I had children.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Go figure.

But I'm I'm kind of working on one. I'm but we're definitely working on two books right now. One is is is gonna be eventually, like, a multiseries, medicinal plants for the Great Lakes region.

Oh.

And I'll probably break that up into Habitats. My my current plan at the moment, and it's been revised several times so it could certainly change, is to start off with, like, lawn weeds and field dwelling plants, and do and it's been revised several times, so it could certainly change, is to start off with, like, lawn weeds and field dwelling plants, and do a whole bunch of plants along that range and have more specific information about each individual plant that I cover. Mhmm. And then go into, like, you know, mixed hardwood forest and then go into, like, wetland type areas and then, you know, coniferous forest to really cover the bioregion.

Okay.

You know, not like that's not a huge endeavor.

It might have something to do with Consume their lives.

They don't even have kids, you know?

I mean, it's just like It's very hard.

It's it's mainly hard because you write something down and you come back to it in several months and you're like, oh, I figured out a better way to say that. And you keep revising and revising and revising and revising.

But the other book I have is probably gonna be on this this notion that I talked about earlier of, like, foundational properties.

Mhmm.

Because what I found is that people learn about herbs, and they learn about it on a more superficial level. And then they get to a certain point, and then they wanna go back, and they wanna learn energetics. And so there are a lot of people who are teaching energetics as like, oh, this is a more advanced class. Mhmm. And my take on it is that that's the foundational class. That should be your starting material.

Mhmm.

And you basically present it. And if it's over their heads, by the time they get to the end of the class, you're going to have repeated it and and reapplied that information so many times that it becomes, the foundational information that they they work everything with.

You know?

You know what we could do? I don't know if you're up for it and then we could like, if you're working on a book in that area is that we could work it out in a mini course like on Herb Mentor, have conversations.

Like, that's what Heather does in the newer village herbalist series. Mhmm. All that'll eventually be books, you know, And then she's kinda working it out by, like, step by step, you know. Working it into little but who knows? Maybe we can work together on that.

Yeah. That would be interested in. Because the more that I think about it and, you know, one of the great things about interacting with people is, you know, I think to myself, like, oh, I've got the greatest way to explain this. Mhmm. You know, because I I love analogies. Mhmm. And sometimes you throw out an analogy and no one gets it.

Right.

And so you get blank looks. Or if it's online, you get people, you know, replying by saying, what did you mean? Mhmm. And I don't get that.

And another time, you can say something like a a good example, it's actually one of my my current favorites, is they'll say, oh, I have arthritis, and I wanna take take an anti inflammatory. What anti inflammatory should I take? And I say, well, that depends on the cause of the arthritis because if you just take an anti inflammatory, even if it works, okay, and it doesn't address the cause of the problem Mhmm. You're not doing yourself a favor.

So if you had arthritis because you didn't have enough, fluid in the body and the joints specifically Mhmm. So there's dryness, there's not enough lubrication. The inflammation is coming from the fact you've got friction of one tissue surface on another, and that's creating heat and damage, and the inflammation is resulting from that. Right?

Mhmm.

So if you take an anti inflammatory that just turns off the inflammation process, you allow that underlying condition to persist Mhmm.

And you'll end up you know, you don't have the pain anymore. You don't have the swelling because you stopped the process, but you're having tissue damage because the dryness is still there.

Oh.

And what the analogy is is that it would be like you wake up at night because your fire alarm is going off. And you get out of bed, and you walk in your kitchen, and your kitchen is on fire.

And you say, oh, how am I gonna sleep with that fire alarm going off? And you get on a chair, and you take the battery out of the fire alarm. And then you go back to bed, and you don't do anything about the fire.

You know?

And and what I find is that those kinds of ways of putting it to people Mhmm.

Make an idea, even if they're not factual or perfect or they, you know, they loosely convey the idea. People understand it better than if you get down to the nitty gritty and explain what all the enzymes and hormones are doing in a, you know, a very specific physiological way. Because you do that and people write it down, but they don't really get it. You do the fire alarm thing and people understand it and they retain that they remember that story, and then they pass it on. And it gets spread around. And then that changes the way that they think about things.

Yeah.

You know, they think, wow.

Am I just taking the batteries out of the fire alarm?

Mhmm.

Or am I looking at the fire and saying, like, how do I this fire out? Exactly. You know?

Wow. That's really so many things. That's great. Thank you for that too. That's another, that's a good point. Bob.

Well, that's a good one. You know, I like when people pass those ideas around.

Yeah. Yeah.

Ed Smith has something. He has, I think, a podcast and a blog that he never Ed Smith is the guy who owns Herb Farm.

Oh.

A blog that he almost never updates, but there's some recordings on there. And one of them that I absolutely love, he talks about wild indigo, Baptisia tinctoria.

Mhmm.

And he says it's good for inflammation that's really low grade, and and it's it's there and it's causing problems that you can't tell. And then he says, it's like a fire that's out, but the coals are hot. Oh. And I love I absolutely love that.

You know? It's like you hear those analogies and you just you get it. You don't need to remember any kind of, like, fancy terminology or anything like that. It just it clicks in and you understand the concept, the idea of what it is.

Yeah. Jim, you know, I really appreciate you taking your time today. And, and I hope, you know, everyone listening just gets a little deeper understanding about, how to go about establishing deeper relationships with plants and understanding properties and all that. And I really look forward to, you know, kinda growing this relationship in the future and then Yeah.

Well, it'll be super to see with the IHS. Yeah.

It'd be awesome. So, you know, Jim McDonald's really been a pleasure and we're, looking forward to, yeah, meeting you in June and, it'd be great to have you back sometime.

Alright. Have a beautiful evening.

Yeah. You as well. Bye bye.

So long.

Herb Mentor Radio on HerbMentor.com is a production of LearningHerbs.com.

Visit LearningHerbs.com for free herbal lessons including Herb Mentor news, home remedy secrets, and supermarket herbalism. You'll also find the herbal medicine making kit and our board game Wildcraft.

Thanks so much for listening.

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